Equality: American Idol

Pat Buchanan

7/4/2013 12:01:00 AM - Pat Buchanan

Ben Franklin is much quoted in today's debate on the trade-off
between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security
Agency's easy access to our phone records and emails.

Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety.

In World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we conscripted millions of men
and sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths fighting against Italians,
Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The greater antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security,
but our insatiable demand and inexorable drive for equality -- not
equality of rights but equality of results.

To equalize incomes, the government confiscates 40 percent of the
earnings of the most successful Americans and uses that wealth to
subsidize the food, health care, housing and income of that half of the
nation that pays no income taxes.

A steeply progressive income tax was originally advanced by that
great egalitarian Karl Marx.

The federal estate tax is 40 percent for the wealthy. Some states
tack on 16 percent. Individuals may spend entire lives acquiring wealth
for their progeny. And governments, in the name of equality, will seize
half of it on their deaths. Socialism, said Winston Churchill, is the
philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.

To guarantee equal pay for equal work, the government has created
agencies to monitor the payrolls of every business, agencies empowered to
identify, expose and punish employers who might dare to use their economic
freedom to reward some workers more than others.

To ensure racial, ethnic, and gender equality in the labor force
and the front office, the government fields thousands of agents to police
the hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions of executives.

Affirmative action and quotas have been imposed on colleges and
universities, stripping those institutions of freedom of choice, to
advance a greater racial, ethnic and gender equality in student bodies and
on faculties than a free and fair competition might produce.

Contract set-asides have been established on which no white male
may bid. To make minorities and women more equal, we make others less
free.

Freedom of assembly, which produced men's and women's clubs and
colleges, has been under assault for decades. Only a handful of men's and women's
colleges survive. Even Augusta National Golf Club was forced to conform to
the dictates of diversity and equality.

To achieve greater equality in the test scores of Asian, white,
Hispanic and black children, enormous sums have been extracted from
taxpayers and shoveled into an educational establishment with little to
show for it in 50 years. Yet the clamor rises for more billions to achieve
this modern form of alchemy.

In a decades-long intrusion on freedom that ignited a social
rebellion, children were forcibly bussed out of their home neighborhoods
across cities to troubled schools to achieve a "racial balance."

Why? Because it was said that through a process of osmosis,
underachievers could attain greater equality with overachievers by having
them sit beside one another in classrooms. Parental freedom yielded to
social dictation.

"A man's home is his castle," was a concept we inherited from
English law and proudly adopted as our own. No more. A man's right to sell
or rent his home is restricted by open housing laws.

Owners of hotels, motels, taverns and restaurants can lose their
licenses if they conduct their businesses according to personal biases and
beliefs.

In the land of the free, such freedom is now illegal.

"If we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to
one another must be equal, as well," said Obama in his second inaugural.
Thus, homosexual unions will soon have to be treated equally with
traditional marriage, though "marriage equality" contradicts Christian
teaching.

Our Union was "founded on the principles of liberty and equality,"
said Obama. But how could that be when the word "equality" does not appear
in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers?

Egalite is rather a founding principle of Robespierre's
revolution, not ours. It is ideological contraband smuggled into America
and the enemy of that freedom for which our fathers fought.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal in
their God-given rights to life and liberty. Does anyone think that
Jefferson, who kept slaves all his life, excoriated Indians in that same
Declaration of Independence and spoke of a "natural aristocracy" that
Providence had wisely provided to govern us, believed all men and all
women were equal in any other way?

In "The Lessons of History," Will and Ariel Durant wrote: "Leave
men free and their natural inequalities will multiply almost
geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under
laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be
sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.

"Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when
one prevails, the other dies."